GermanyText und Data Mining (General Text and Data Mining Exception)
Urheberrechtsgesetz (UrhG), § 44b
In force since .
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- May reproduce lawfully accessible works for text and data mining, but must delete the reproduction once it is no longer needed for that purpose.no control in the NIST AI RMF
- Do not disregard a rightsholder's machine-readable reservation of rights over a work accessible online; a reservation made only in natural language is not effective.NIST AI RMFMAP 4.1
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
In the frameworks
- NIST AI RMF
- MAP 4.1Approaches for mapping AI technology and legal risks of its components – including the use of third-party data or software – are in place, followed, and documented, as are risks of infringement of a third party’s intellectual property or other rights.
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework, and in the NIST AI RMF, line by line beside each duty above. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law
Who enforces it
Settledness
- As of
- Open questions
- Does a reservation in a website's natural-language terms of use satisfy 'maschinenlesbarer Form' under Section 44b(3) sentence 2, or only a machine-readable signal such as a robots.txt directive?
- Does a reservation made after a work was downloaded affect the copies already made under Section 44b(2), given that Section 44b(3) bars uses 'nur zulässig, wenn der Rechtsinhaber sich diese nicht vorbehalten hat'?
What it makes you log
Log retention
The copies must be deleted when no longer needed for text and data mining.
- As of
- Basis
- Purpose bound
- Prohibits retaining
- Copies made for text and data mining once they are no longer necessary for the mining
Logging duty
Section 44b permits copies of lawfully accessible works for text and data mining unless the rightholder has reserved the use, and requires the copies to be deleted once they are no longer needed for the mining. The deletion duty limits keeping the copies; it requires no log or record.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Text and data mining is defined as the automated analysis of one or more digital or digitised works to derive information, in particular about patterns, trends and correlations. Reproducing lawfully accessible works for text and data mining is permitted, and the reproduction must be deleted once it is no longer needed for that purpose.
This use is permitted only if the rightsholder has not reserved it, and a reservation over a work accessible online is effective only if made in machine-readable form.
This is Germany's transposition of the EU text-and-data-mining exception and its opt-out mechanism, applicable to AI-model training and other automated collection of lawfully accessible text and data, including web-scraped content, and it is expressly extended to the sui generis database right by the database-right provision's own limitations clause.
How courts have read itPremium data
Our analysis of this law draws on 2 court rulings.
What each ruling held, what it means for an app, and whether it still stands are premium data, in the Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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